Caring for Your Missionary #1 Prayer

We are all members together of the ‘household of Christ’; co-workers and partners in the gospel. “As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts to grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.” (Ephesians 4:16, NLT). We therefore bear the obligations to care for each other as we are interdependent on each other. The St Matthew’s Missions Working Group hopes that by now you have chosen a missionary from the board in the foyer to ‘adopt’.

As a sending church we have the privilege of being able to care for our missionaries in partnership with their mission agency and their receiving church. We should take our responsibility seriously and ensure that we support the people we send.

How can we do this? The most important thing we can do is to pray for your missionary. As well as praying for your missionary on your own, you can help by bringing your missionary’s prayer needs before other people.

Here are some prayer ideas:

Include a prayer for your missionary in your family prayer & Bible study.
Distribute their prayer points and newsletters to members of your congregation and small groups.
Pass on prayer points to the Kid’s Church leaders. CMS missionary Sue Jaggar recently received drawings from Sunday School children, and was delighted to know a six year old was praying for her.
Collect email addresses so that the mission agency can email your adopted missionaries’ prayer points directly to individual people.
Join a missions prayer group or start one of your own. St Matthew’s currently has mission prayer groups that meet on a Monday night and every Thursday morning.
Encourage people to take part in mission events, eg CMS’s annual Missionary Awareness Conference.

Check up on recent prayer points on your missionary’s blog or the mission agency’s website. Most agencies offer regular prayer point updates through email subscriptions or RSS feeds. Let missionaries know about your prayers—Russell and Kay Clark, missionaries in Tanzania, said “the best thing is to hear that we are being prayed for”.
Khim Harris